SOPA and PIPA: Website Strikes

Wikipedia was not available yesterday, and it was not a glitch. It was a political protest against U.S. plans to pursue the violation of intellectual property rights sanctions on the network, with the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA), and “Protect Intellectual Property Act” (PIPA). "The sites are on strike," says a member of the protest movement against SOPA and PIPA with the United States, who wants to regulate the violation of copyright laws.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act, a law against Internet piracy) and PIPA (Protection of Intellectual Property Act) will be debated in the House of Representatives, which will then be taken to the Senate, who wants to throw bolt the violation of intellectual property rights. These measures that want to pass are against "intellectual property theft." This not only means copies of music, movies, books, or software: but also the use of protected works and other items that... contain part of the protected work.

To combat the violation of the copyright laws in foreign websites, Internet providers must observe the entry of addresses. The law allows justice to go against the provider’s websites and punished. But there are techniques, such as those used by dissidents in China or Iran to circumvent Internet censorship.

Search engines will also be forced to remove from its pages, links to offending foreign websites, five days after the order of the prosecutor. The Google search engine also is against the rules SOPA: in the U.S., the logo of the famous search engine yesterday was covered by a black curtain.

Despite numerous requests from Internet activists in the blackout are also involved commercial Internet providers because of economic interests. "SOPA and PIPA is a badly designed set of laws that do not lead to the main objective (to stop the violation of copyright) and it severely damages the Internet, which is free," added the Wikipedia team to explain their 24 hour blackout.